


Commanding Officer

by chantefable



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: 1930s, Bisexual Steve Rogers, Brooklyn, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Department X, F/M, Friends With Benefits, Friends to Lovers, Historical References, Irish Steve Rogers, M/M, Multi, Natasha Romanov Backstory, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Pre-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Red Room (Marvel), Soviet Union, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-05-14 15:11:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14772020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chantefable/pseuds/chantefable
Summary: Natalya Alyanovna Romanova, right-hand woman to rogue superhero unit leader Steve Rogers, is currently resting her back on the floor of a modest safe-house, thinking in the dark.Happiness is a choice that requires effort at times.





	Commanding Officer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [csichick_2](https://archiveofourown.org/users/csichick_2/gifts).



"Happiness is a choice that requires effort at times."  
Aeschylus

  
  


"The most amazing combinations can result if you shuffle the pack enough."  
Mikhail Bulgakov

  


***

The safe-house is drafty and the old kitchen clock is ticking loud enough to be heard in every room. The floorboards creak under Steve's feet whenever he goes to the bathroom during the night.

Had there been anyone else to see him, hear him, he probably would have played up the embarrassment, given a coy look from under his sooty eyelashes. He does not bother with Natasha, though. The body has needs. What is natural cannot be loathsome. The Maribor safe-house is cramped enough; there is no room for awkwardness in these walls.

There is little playacting when it is just the two of them. She is not Wanda, or the overenthusiastic ant, or Sam, or even Clint; she does not need parental reassurance, a larger-than-life icon, a trustworthy leader and friend, a reliable anchor. Natasha knows the lay of the land. She just needs a commanding officer. 

Choosing one is a luxury, and she relishes every moment. For the world's best known Black Widow, there is nothing particularly exciting or new in being a fugitive, or part of a secret vigilante unit, or being somebody's second. But moments like these – when it is just the two of them and she takes the first watch, alone in the dark as she stretches out on the bare floor and lets her spine rest – moments like these simply feel good.

A hundred little knots are releasing in her body, involuntary tremors starting and fading as she breathes into it in the dark. 

The body remembers.

The cold bite of the bed's metal frame against bare calves. Aluminum spoons so soft one could bend them with bony fingers, precious oatmeal, filling rations. Running, swimming, assembling and disassembling radio equipment. Days filled with rigid routine and rhythm, building skills to be applied in circumstances they are not imagining. It is not that they could not imagine, had they wanted to. But what is the need? The smell and sound of warm, alive bodies in the dormitories, and the knowledge that the carefully measured rations, and wood chopping, and scrubbing the floors in the hangars would still be there the next day are more important and reassuring. For a flock of starved, unneeded girls who have survived the famine, the program is a marvel. So they learn to prioritize and value stability and predictability. 

The body remembers the overwhelming sense of lightness and the certainty of death, cold bodies with sharp noses lying in the streets, and hopelessness as vast as the wheat fields. Natasha has never been as hungry as she had been in 1932, but it had happened. Irrevocable, irreversible.

People who try to scare Natasha with data dumps and Senate hearings are just as unfathomably stupid as those who try to scare her with broken bones and needles under her nails.

The body remembers what it is like to have terror rising to your throat. The body remembers what it is like to breathe in and not breathe out for four minutes: not because you are plunged underwater to train your lungs, not because you need to keep absolutely still and in complete control for target practice and you don't know better yet, but because a van has stopped at the gate, and there are men in Yakov Isaakovich's office, and they hear rifles firing, loud and clear. In the times of Yezhov, most of the curators of the program perish, are replaced, and their replacements are quickly executed as well; some of the girls are gassed in the vans as saboteurs; the people in white jackets who injected them with the first serum are imprisoned. The body absorbs the knowledge, bends and adapts: death is sudden, undeniable, unjust. 

One does not know what to expect. Morality is a flimsy shield if someone has the power to decide who lives and who dies, and someone else is willing to follow those orders. Decisions have consequences. They attempt to scrub Yakov Isaakovich's office clean but the blood has seeped into the hardwood and into the heavy, ornate writing-table from before the Revolution. The next head curator has them paint it over. (He turns out to be a 'dangerous ethnic minority' and soon disappears.) The next one brings new people in white jackets and they run faster, fight harder, heal better. When Natasha comes back from the hospital, there is another one. He, too, disappears quickly. Both of them branded as 'intelligentsia', 'elites'; but at least those hadn't sent them on surveillance assignments. Their bodies are thin and compact enough to squeeze in through the windows, their faces bland enough to pass for any urchin, for anyone else, if need be. They turn out to be quite useful in scourging the land from threats real and imaginary, their dry, meager reports used as a skeleton for fanciful libel, time and time again.

By the time Beria suspends the execution of death sentences, they all feel filthy, as they should, for being instrumental in things beyond their control. They are tools to be used, and no one is going to bother to clean them, absolve them of anything. At best, they are going to be thrown away. 

They learn faster, recall better. They carefully do not talk about black cars coming after people late at night, about the camps for the family members of traitors to the motherland, confiscated property and shuffled positions in the power institutions. Their last curator is from the military, has a glint in his eye and arms which are in blood up to the elbows, and miraculously stays on well after Beria's clean-up. He gives long speeches and calls himself and the girls 'survivors'.

He does survive through many things, but not the third year of the Great Patriotic War. Something about SMERSH not wanting to bother figuring out the tangle of possibly false, possibly true mutual accusations between the Red Room and the Department X regarding HYDRA and Leviathan. These details are not something Natasha remembers; but she remembers some of the girls sent to fight on the front lines and some to work at the evacuated factories, intelligence gathering and testing the limits of their newfound quasi-invulnerability. Her mind may be too full and store nothing but a blur of sensation and a few stark images, but the body remembers: the right grip on the wheel of the supply truck and the weight of the rifle in her hands, tongue and throat in sync when speaking a foreign language, rapid-fire finger movements sending coded messages. 

All the previously acquired skills became useful, even vitally necessary at some point. Holding one's breath underwater, carrying out unspeakable orders, and watching your comrades die without making a sound. Surviving, operating within a predictable structure, submitting to authority and following orders at all costs. 

So many things turn into muscle memory. It makes dissembling easier, because there are so many resources to draw from. 

The safe-house is quiet, but she can hear night-time traffic in the street, the cough of exhaust pipes and the shriek of wheels outside. She shifts on the floor and her hip joints pop, too loud. There's a burn in her calves. She really should stop fighting in such uncomfortable heeled footwear. But as with many things, it is simply something she has done so often it hardly registers.

So many things turn into muscle memory. Obedience and indifference easily become bad habits that are hard to break. 

Tony Stark, who thinks he has real leverage in the negotiation of the Sokovian Accords or a real grasp of their underlying strategy, is more delusional and more dangerous than most think. 

For most, the past is far enough away to be easily glorified or forgotten without attempting to comprehend its lessons; for Natasha, the past is in the spiderweb of healed fractures in her bones and the faces of the countless dead: the famine, the purges, the war that stretches over years.

Natasha is only ten years younger than Steve. And unlike him, she has lived through every day of her life.

The floorboards groan miserably when he comes and stretches beside her on the sticky linoleum floor. She turns her head to watch the outline of his chest rise and fall in the dark. He looks like he wants to talk about Bucky. 

Usually she lets him, when she senses he is in a mood like that. Often, it takes him over as if by accident. 

Like last week; they were trying keep their heads down after providing support after a landslide a few miles away from Madripoor, and Vision set up a rendez-vous with Wanda while pretending to look for them, following orders. Steve stayed back with Natasha, and while she was packing up the equipment to work off the excess energy, he read. 'The Master and Margarita', a nicer translation she had shrugged at when he admitted not getting ahead with the original she had given him. It is strange how these things work; Steve's mind is strong and agile, and he can pick up so many skills with ease, and yet his war-mandated French is still so much better than his Russian. It is like some vital part of his brain responsible for language learning had been frozen, but Natasha knows that cannot be true. Why would it be true? The brain is strong, as strong as flesh and bone. The Winter Soldier had learned many languages; some slowly and painfully, in some he had always had horrible pronunciation, and some he forgot way too quickly. But he always learned. 

(Now the Winter Soldier has an awkward accent _in Russian_. His grammar is atrocious and she wants to tear the damn butchers who had had him in their clutches for the past years, tear them limb from limb.)

Steve is breathing next to her, deep and warm and steady. Back then, in a drafty hangar on the outskirts of Madripoor, he barked a laugh, happy and dog-like, and read from the page: “Just like a murderer jumps out of nowhere in an alley, love jumped out in front of us and struck us both at once.” And Natasha knew even before he opened his mouth again, sensed it in her gun callouses and that vertebra in her tail bone that always aches when it's about to rain. She knew that he was about to talk about Bucky, about Brooklyn, about the docks and the parks and the lavender bouquets, sweaty, graphite-stained hands and simple, eager kisses.

She let him. He has to talk to someone, after all. He won't talk to Sam about it, or to anyone. There is only a thin layer of Steve than he judges fit to present to the world he is in now, and the other ninety-five or so per cent of him is carefully camouflaged and obfuscated in order to avoid giving any potential advantage to any potential enemy. Sound judgment, and Natasha supports him, as her CO and her friend. But there is collateral damage, as usual; as usual, it is Natasha. He has to talk, and therefore, she has to listen. And because he is a friend, a real friend, a chosen friend, she must truly listen and leave herself open. That time in the hangar, up to the elbow in oil and dirt, Natasha wanted to scream and slap him, and to say, _I don't want to listen, I don't want to care, I don't want to love you, why are you pushing this at me, how dare you, I've had enough, I've had more than enough_. But she hadn't. She forced herself to listen, to hear and to care. She always does, consumes Steve's rants and rambles as emotion, as sincerity, and not as profile information. It is excruciating. 

Steve doesn't care, of course. What do officers care for grunts, after all. Send her dig the trenches, sentence her to emotional labor, it is all the same to him. She knows that he knows how hard this is for her, has read it in his eyes, and yet he keeps pouring it on her. It is like he knows that this is the kind of cruelty that will bind her to him, and so he keeps going, plunging her deeper into non-indifference, non-distance, non-avoidance. 

Steve has lived so little compared to her, and he has to talk to someone. Some things have miraculously become for Natasha's ears alone, like his suffragette Trotskyist mother, and his father who surely would have come back home to fight for Ireland if he hadn't been killed in the Great War. The merry clubs of New York that have been miraculously erased from public memory, and that Steve bemoans the fact that no one understands his slang anymore, anywhere, that it's worse than when they met up in London with Peggy and her brother, who had been MI5 _and_ homosexual, and there were layers upon layers of jokes and hints he would not understand with their London crowd. His monologues are disjointed, and she lets him talk it out and never responds in kind. 

For him, those years are fresh; for her, they are covered with patina of age. Duty, service, and body modification.

For him, everything ends with Bucky – Bucky dancing, Bucky boxing, Bucky marching with the unions with Steve's mother, and Father O'Brien from their church, together under a banner Steve had painted. 

But for Natasha, Bucky is a necessary footnote. When it comes to her, there is Natasha herself, not a person but an archive of an era, a never-ending, ever-stretching web of lives, guises and missions, and somewhere parallel to her (but also inside, where blood pulses in her temple) there is – 

– Yasha, named after Yakov Isaakovich by those who still remembered him, as reliable as a rogue bear but trusting, gentle, soaking everything up like a sponge at the ZATO they'd kept him at, trapped like in a zoo cage –

– Alexei, the best with the Taiga rifle, Lyokha, always eager to sing 'Smuglyanka' with the Red Room boys, Lyosha, Lyoshenka, why did she let him out of sight after the Thaw, why did she go along with the rejuvenation –

– Boris, always sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued, and her, uncomfortably thin and young as a ballerina in Bolshoi, and then once again in the Mariinsky Theater, and then in the Beryozka ensemble, her backing him up and him backing her up as they sought and shot, sabotaged and misinformed, her backing him up as they put her cells in him to restore what was damaged, him backing her up as they discussed promotions in the Red Room, always together, hand in hand, in combat and backroom politics –

– Yevgeniy, deployments in Afghanistan, Karpov getting his hands on him, swaying him in his favor, and the Red Room and Department X were at each other's throats for real that time, they would see each other for covert missions in third world countries, give stellar results, and then write dispassionate reports about each other's blunders and untrustworthiness, fuck and put it in reports, too –

– the Winter Soldier whom they promptly sold to the West after Perestroika like scrap metal and she had not even known, hadn't known for years –

– the Asset who put a bullet in her in Odessa like a last kiss, right where Lyosha used to put his mouth and tease with his teeth –

– her longest love and her best commanding officer.

Natasha does not talk to Steve about that. It seems too much, and somehow unkind. Because the truth is, her woe is greater, and her happiness had also been greater. She can feel the truth of it down to the marrow of her sturdy bones, and she is not sure Steve is ready to handle it just yet. Maybe in another twenty years. Right now, it will not do to compromise his combat readiness with Natasha's memories and confessions; too many people depend on him, herself, Wanda, Sam…

He knows that his Natasha and his Bucky have had each other, and that is enough for now.

For now, Steve is breathing next to her, wraps his fingers around her pulse point, and opens his mouth.

“They wrote that I was Protestant, though I clearly remember putting myself down as Catholic. Bucky, too...”

It always comes back to Bucky.

Natasha turns on her side, feels her back muscles shift and realign, and watches Steve's face in the dark, thinking that it's nice, in a way. Maybe they can have sex in the morning. It is different than it had been with her and Clint, who had been awfully fragile in Budapest, and let himself believe she was really who she wanted SHIELD to think she was, and not, as he says now, 'old enough to be his grandma and just as vicious'. It is not like Clint marrying his handler, though Natasha has warmed to her over the years, and even stopped threatening (albeit only after Laura stopped reporting on Clint to Fury, but that is only fair). It is not like anyone and anyone, and definitely not like her and Lyosha (Yasha, Borya, Zhenya), but it's nice.

It's a good habit.

She makes herself listen, makes herself care, and does not think about lying on the floor of the widows' barracks, or clinging to another body in the trenches, or listening to surveillance tapes. The body responds, slowly but surely, and the mind learns along: a new skill, a new relationship, by choice.

They fit well and they help each other. Natasha likes to think that Bucky (Lyosha, Yasha, she knows he's there, she talked to him in Bucharest before she let Steve have him) will approve. He looks like he approves whenever they contact each other via the Wakandan equivalent of Skype, stares at her like Zhenya had after a particularly gruelling session with Karpov, but he smiles at Steve and he smiles at her, and says, “I miss you” to them both.

She misses him, too.

Missing him is one of the better things she remembers. 

Natasha listens to the ticking of the clock, obscenely loud in the empty apartment, and lets herself drift. When Steve's watch comes he pulls her closer and sings 'The Bonny Bunch of Roses' into her hair.

She stays in the here and now, at Steve's side like a trusted lieutenant but also in his arms, and dreams of the day they will come to Wakanda again, so she can get off the stealth jet and walk right up to James Buchanan Barnes, and tell him, 

_“Zdravstvuy, komandir.”_

**Author's Note:**

> Soviet famine of 1932–33: a major man-made famine that killed millions of people in the grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union (Ukraine, Northern Caucasus, Volga Region and Kazakhstan, the South Urals, and West Siberia).
> 
> Yezhovshchina: the most intense purge of 1937-38 during the Stalinist political repressions (lit.times or doings of Yezhov, named after Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD).
> 
> SMERSH: lit. acronym of 'death to spies', an umbrella organization of counter-intelligence agencies of the Red Army during World War II.
> 
> ZATO: closed administrative territorial formation.
> 
> Khruschev's Thaw: a period of reorganization and liberalization after Stalin's death in 1953. 
> 
> Smuglyanka (The Swarthy Girl): a 1940s Russian song in the style of a Moldovan folk song, glorifying female partisans of the Russian Civil War.
> 
> The Bonny Bunch of Roses: a 19th century Irish folk ballad about the Napoleonic wars.
> 
>  _Komandir_ (Russian: командир): commanding officer, CO. 
> 
> _Zdravstvuy_ (Russian: здравствуй): form of greeting originating from wishing wellness/good health.


End file.
